Conventional search engines operating in a networked computer environment such as the World Wide Web or in an individual computer can provide search results in response to entry of a user's search query. In many instances, the search results are ranked in accordance with the search engine's scoring or ranking system or method. For example, conventional search engines score or rank documents of a search result for a particular query by the number of times a keyword or particular word or phrase appears in each document in the search results. Documents include, for example, web pages of various formats, such as HTML, XML, XHTML; Portable Document Format (PDF) files; and word processor and application program document files. Other search engines base scoring or ranking results on more than the content of the document. For example, one known method, described in an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper-textual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to a document, such as a web page, based on the link structure of the web page. Other conventional methods involve selling a higher score or rank in search results for a particular query to third parties that want to attract users or customers to their websites.
In some instances, a user in a particular location may enter a search query in a search engine to obtain search results relevant to the user. For example, a user in Japan may enter a search query to obtain search results that include Japanese language websites. In response to such queries, conventional search engines can return unreliable search results since there is relatively little data to rank or score search results according to the user's location that are relevant or useful to the user for the search query.
Conventional search engines can determine location information associated with a user from the type of web browser application used to access the search engine. For example, when a user downloads a web browser application from the Internet, the user may have the option to download a particular version of the application depending upon the user's preferred language, e.g. Japanese or French versions. When a user uses the French version of a web browser application to access a search engine via the Internet, the search engine can often determine that the user is likely located in France merely by detecting use of the French version of the web browser application.
Other conventional search engines obtain location information by the country domain suffix a particular user used in a search query. For example, a Japanese user requesting the Japanese version of a search engine may input the web address for the search engine with the country domain suffix of “co.jp” instead of the domain name suffix “.com.” Based on such input, a search engine could determine that the user is likely located in Japan.
If a search engine returns more than one search result in response to a search query, the search results may be displayed as a list of links to the documents associated with the search results. a user may browse and visit a website associated with one or more of the search results to evaluate whether the website is relevant to the user's search query. For example, a user may manipulate a mouse or another input device and “click” on a link to a particular search result to view a website associated with the search result. In many instances, the user will browse and visit several websites provided in the search result, clicking on links associated with each of the several websites to access various websites associated with the search results before locating useful or relevant information to address the user's search query.
Clicking on multiple links to multiple websites associated with a single set of search results can be time consuming. It is desirable to improve the ranking algorithm used by search engines and to therefore provide users with better search results.